In My Memory Locked Read online

  The concrete fortress was precariously balanced atop the Alcatraz rocks as though a swift kick would send it down to the roiling bay waters. Its brutalist architecture suggested no stylistic period other than the incarceration-happy 20th century. Back in the day, it was armed to the teeth. That rainy morning in 2038, I doubted there was so much as an air gun kept on the island. Emptied of prisoners before I was born, converted to a tourist attraction, shuttered after the mystique faded, the deserted Alcatraz was repurposed once more in 2028. The island was no longer inhabited by murderers, bank robbers, or park rangers. Now it was inhabited by a government commission and its employees standing guard over the only remaining copy of the Old Internet.

  Dry deckhands in Federal-blue peacoats emerged from the ferry’s warm hold. Barehanded, emotionless, they unwound rope as thick as zoo boas from the top deck storage holds. When the ferry nudged against the pier, they tossed the lines over to the dockworkers with nary a word shouted. Rain pelted them. Gusts sent sea spray across the deck and dock. Together, the men tamed the kicking ferry until it was tight against Alcatraz’s only serviceable dock. The ferry crew dragged out a steel gangway from below deck and bridged the gap between watercraft and dry land.

  My hard-soled brogues made hollow knocks down the gangway to the dock. Before I disembarked, I gave an obligatory nod of thanks to the ruddy-cheeked deckhand holding the gangway steady. He didn’t care either way. Only one passenger that day, me, a graying raisin-faced guy in a Scotchgarded raincoat, a guy old enough to be his father and probably twice the son-of-a-bitch.

  Up the path from the dock, spray-painted on a concrete wall that once kept hardened men inside this hardened place, was the most recent evidence of this continent’s aboriginal man on this soulless rock. Native Americans occupied the island for a year and a half before they were embargoed off. They left behind spray-painted reminders of their stand against the Federal government:

  INDIANS

  WELCOME

  INDIAN LAND

  Three men waited up the path from the dock. Two were ancient and as long-bearded as Father Time. The third in the middle was slim and taller and tennis-fit, with a trim gray Van Dyke beard outlining his mouth. All wore bespoke worsted wool suits and held black Lombard Street umbrellas that kept them surprisingly dry considering the downpour.

  “Mr. Naroy,” the slim man with the Van Dyke called through the rain.

  My face made an immediate impression on them—the three of them blanched when I drew close. I was used to this reaction. I pretended not to notice.

  The slim man cautiously extended from under his umbrella a dry, bony hand. “I’m Dr. Elgin Clift, Chief Commissioner.” We shook hands, two quick pumps. He withdrew his hand and wiped it on his trousers, eyes studying my pruned, bulbous face. “This is Dr. Warwick and Dr. Marker.” He motioned to the men on his left and right. “Let’s get inside?”

  A motorized electric surrey waited for us at the end of the asphalt path. Weatherproof flaps over its sides kept the rain out. Its driver wore a navy blue woolen hat, a fir-green jacket, and gray slacks under a rain slicker. It was the same uniform as the stevedores working the dock. They were unloading from the ferry canned and frozen goods with hand trucks. They trucked the foodstuffs down the gangway and into a storeroom.

  “The ferry only comes over once a day,” Clift explained to me when we were seated in the surrey. “We use every opportunity to restock our supplies.”

  “No other mode of transportation?” I asked.

  “That ferry is the only way on and off the island,” Clift said.

  He told the driver to go. The surrey lurched forward and began a slow, steady climb up the hill.

  Our driver navigated the switchbacks with bored ease. We passed numerous decrepit abandoned buildings, some brick, others constructed of plank wood falling apart like limp cardboard due to the continuous downpours. Above us, the main prison house crouched atop Alcatraz’s rocks. The surrey ride ended at the base of the prison house.

  Past the abandoned ticket booth once thronged by tourists, through multiple sets of double-braced steel doors, we reached the interior of the stark prison. A welcoming warmth greeted us inside. On rubber mats, we stripped off our soaked jackets and hats and shook the rain off our umbrellas and sleeves. A young man with dark greased-back hair emerged from the maze of prison cells. He was dressed in a crisply-pressed plum-colored suit and wore a bow-tie the color of Pepto-Bismol. A vanilla-cream carnation was pinned to his lapel. He silently wove between us collecting our things and offering warm hand towels to dry our faces.

  "You can leave your bag here, Mr. Naroy," Clift instructed me. "Brill will carry it from here."

  "It's sensitive equipment," I told him. "I prefer to carry it myself."

  Dr. Clift, gaunt and towering, peered down at me. "As you wish."

  Out of his jacket and hat, the silver-haired Dr. Clift demonstrated considerably more vigor than Warwick and Marker. Although he required a walking stick, his stride was brisk and energetic. The silver-plated tip of his walking stick clicked smartly when it struck the umber coating of the prison's concrete floor. Walking aside him, I noted the top grip of his stick was a silver elephant hugging itself into a sphere the size of a bocce ball. His gnarled hand was a stern claw on the back of this miniature pachyderm. Dr. Clift was richly tanned, unusual in a place where it rains every day. Unlike Marker’s and Warwick’s brambly beards, his Van Dyke was thoughtfully trimmed, like he’d scooped his beard from a jar that morning and smoothed it across his face.

  “How are your legs holding up after the trip across the bay?” he asked me.

  “It’s been a while since I’ve been on the water. For good reason.” I nodded toward the other two. “What exactly are your positions here?”

  “Dr. Marker is head of Data Integrity & Cohesion,” Dr. Clift explained for them. “Dr. Warwick leads Digital Storage & Synoptics.”

  “Synoptics,” I said. “As in fiber optics?”

  “As in joining disparate historical accounts into a unifying narrative,” Dr. Clift explained.

  Drs. Marker and Warwick appeared put-out by my presence, as though my muddy shoes and dripping trousers were evidence of fundamental character flaws within. Out of their coats and disarmed of their umbrellas, they separated from us and headed deeper into the prison complex.

  “Do you understand what we do here?” Clift asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “You guard the Internet. The Old Internet.”

  “Guard?” Clift said, amused. “You think we’re keeping the Old Internet prisoner?”

  “Well, considering the history of this place.”

  “We merely required a sizable and isolated location to keep the preserved data safe. Alcatraz was chosen for its square feet as much as its sturdy construction. We’re not prison guards.”

  “You are keeping the Old Internet under lock and key. You’re keeping it read-only and protected from further modification.”

  “We're ensuring it's accessible to the world at large,” Clift said. “People still enjoy connecting to the Old Internet to revel in the past.” He pointed out the path we were to take through the cell house. “Let me introduce you to Michigan Avenue.”

  “Michigan—?”

  “When this was a penitentiary, the prisoners named each row of cells after famous American streets. Michigan Avenue, Broadway, and so on.”

  Dr. Clift led me down a seemingly endless corridor of prison cells, a mirror-into-mirror effect of steel bars and scaffolding receding to a vanishing point. Each cell still contained its hard cot and sink and toilet, although they were of no use to their occupants. Now within each cell stood a hulking data node, a flat-black monolith as big as a restaurant freezer. It occupied each cell's rear wall from floor to ceiling. An array of warm blue dots pulsed randomly across its chest. Tubes delivered liquid nitrogen to keep each machine cool.

  “Dr. Warwick fashioned a kind of thermostat for us,” Clift said. “We slow the rate of liquid n
itrogen and allow the ambient heat from the machines to heat the complex.”

  I motioned to one of the hulking nodes. “As I understand it, you’re holding a complete copy of the Old Internet from 1995 to 2028. Every web page, every blog and newspaper, every video ever uploaded, every comment and posting ever made. Movies, television, music, social networks—the whole kit and kaboodle.”

  “All indexed by date, author, subject, and geographic location,” Clift said. “Each time you see one of those blue dots light up, that’s someone on the Nexternet accessing the Old Internet. In essence—” He stroked his mustache with an imperious smirk. “—each of those blue dots is someone remembering the world's collective past.”

  We reached the end of Michigan Avenue. Through double doors propped open, we passed into the prison mess. A hundred years earlier, men in issued denim lined the far wall for their three squares a day. Now it was a blank hall, big enough for an Elks Club New Year’s Eve party, with only a single table in the center for dining.

  “I hope you brought an appetite with you,” Clift said to me.

  Having missed breakfast with Agg, lunch did sound tempting. “I would like to get down to business.”

  “In time, in time,” Clift said with a light patronizing smile.

  A sole table occupied the mess hall, a grand round one of ornate carved oak with mahogany insets. It stood on a woven Persian rug of the same shape and size. A delicate lace cloth covered the center of the table like a spider’s web. The centerpiece was a Japanese vase holding a single azalea. Large enough for twelve, there were a mere four table settings, each spaced equidistant apart. Drs. Marker and Warwick were seated and waiting for us. Dr. Marker had already tucked his linen napkin under his chin.

  “Thierry has prepared his beef roast with a port wine reduction for our luncheon,” Clift said. “If the past is any indicator, I reckon it will be pretty good.”

  "Thierry?"

  "My chef de cuisine," Clift informed me.

  "He works for you?"

  "For the Commission," Clift said offhandedly, as though a tick annoyed at my denseness.

  Before each table setting were names on folded card stock. Theirs were printed, mine was handwritten. Someone had misspelled my name Naroi.

  Only when Clift and I were seated did the young man in the plum suit reappear. Brill emerged from the kitchen carrying a basket and a small serving tray. Across the spacious mess, the swinging kitchen door looked half a mile away.

  Brill offered each of us warm sourdough rolls and pretzel bread from the woven basket covered with a linen napkin. Using tongs, he plucked marbles of butter from a chilled bowl and added them to our bread plates. Bread served, he poured iced tea for each of us from a glass pitcher filled with oversized cubes and lemon quarters. He placed bottles of uncorked wine around the table, each a different vintage and variety, six bottles total, way too much for this crowd. Every time the young man came close, he smelled like a pomade factory. His hair seemed held in aspic.

  Dr. Clift suggested a Livermore Valley Petite Syrah. He poured a glass for me. “I know you’d like to get right to business, but we operate at a slightly different pace here.”

  “You requested I reserve my entire afternoon for you.”

  Brill went to a dark oak cabinet standing in the corner of an otherwise blank wall. From it, he produced thick woolen blankets with loose fringe. He laid one over Dr. Warwick. He covered the old man up to the chin. He did the same for Dr. Marker, giving him time to adjust his chin napkin so it lay atop the blanket. Unlike the warm cell block, the concrete mess hall offered little fight against the cold air seeping in from the outside. The prison’s wrought-iron bars remained over the windows. Through their cracks and unsealed gaps, the wind whistled inside.

  “Before we begin discussing our needs and requirements—” Clift motioned to the back of my neck with a curved hand, fingers splayed like God reaching for Adam. “Your memex? Could you—?” He mimed a pulling motion, like prying a dart from a dartboard.

  I was chewing on a clump of sourdough. “I turned it off the moment I stepped off the ferry.”

  “Could you humor me?”

  I drank down the knot of bread with a slug of wine. “It’s your dime.”

  Using my fingernail, I pried up the fleshy button embedded in the back of my neck and removed a pink flexible thumbtack. Its sharp end was a long twist of translucent filament threads spiraled to a point. They glistened with residual spinal fluid. With my memex disconnected from my spinal cord, I could now prove I was offline. I set it among the torn chunks of bread on my dish. Detached and cooling, the twisted opalescent filaments went limp. They wilted like an exotic Amazonian plant transported to Antarctica.

  “We’re off-the-record now,” I said. “But as I said, it was never on.”

  “We’ve not signed a contract with you yet,” Marker croaked at me. Only his gray face and rheumy pink eyes were visible from under the blanket. His voice was as dry as a hot tailpipe.

  “Contract or not, we still have a legal relationship I’m bound to honor,” I said. “Gentlemen, I’m licensed and bonded with the State of California. I’ve been in the computer security field for eight years now. I’ve cancelled appointments and I'm half-seasick and I’m wet to the bone. No offense to your man here—” I waved one hand toward our plum-suited waiter. “But I could’ve gotten a better meal downtown, and without taking a ferry ride that would’ve turned Hemingway green.”

  Clift, amused, indicate for Brill to bring the soup course. “I think we’re all in understanding,” he said to me.

  “I hope so. Now, while I appreciate that time has ground to a halt out here, it hasn’t come to a halt for me or my schedule, so maybe we can get on with it. Your message to me was that you required consulting on data security.”

  "Indeed." Clift sniffed with a sideways grin as though winding up a sales pitch. “When humanity left the Internet behind, the question presented was, could it be preserved for future generations? Can we maintain a snapshot of the Internet as it existed from the beginning of the World Wide Web to its final day of utility in 2027?”

  “So the Feds incorporated this.” I motioned about the room as though it represented the entire island. “The Old Internet Preservation Commission. The government gave you the run of Alcatraz Island, gave you the prison, and allocates the funds you need to store the Old Internet here.”

  Soup emerged from the kitchen on a rolling cart, a portable hot table of white ceramic French serving pots with blue glazed flowers. Brill spooned the soup into oversized mugs and topped each with croutons and slivers of hard white cheese. When set before me, the tomato bisque steamed up a thick fog that caressed my cheeks. Still chilled and damp from the ferry ride, the hearty soup did its good work with only a few mouthfuls.

  “Your assessment is only half-correct,” Clift said. “The Federal government deeded us the island and the prison complex gratis the American taxpayer, although we’re prevented from making any structural alterations. Alcatraz is to be preserved just as it was the last day the convicts marched out of here double-file.”

  “Looks like the other inhabitants of the island didn’t respect that idea,” I said.

  “You’re speaking of the Indians of One Tribe movement. We’re not allowed to remove evidence of their presence either. It’s considered part of the history of the island. We've agreed to preserve their messages as certainly as we preserve the prison, the old schoolhouse, the chapel, and so forth.”

  Clift did not say this flippantly, cynical of the idea of preserving the graffiti. He spoke as an archivist, an academic packrat intent on preserving every last bit of human culture.

  “As far as money goes, we receive a trivial amount of funding from the Federal government,” he said. “Day-to-day operations are paid for out of the pockets of donors and benevolent trusts.”

  As I finished my cup of soup, the young man reemerged from the kitchen. He rolled to the table a stainless steel cart with a clamshel
l top. Its pleated top opened like an old-fashioned rolltop desk. Inside was a charred roast loin on a spit, a small pot of the promised port wine reduction, a tray of browned potatoes, and creamed spinach, all heated by three licking tongues of propane flame below.

  “Must take deep pockets to keep this place running,” I said.

  “We are funded by family names you would recognize,” Clift said. “Families that made their fortunes some forty years ago off the Internet.” He listed off some of these names. They were as familiar as any name in America’s history books. They were names you would not associate with railroads or automobiles or oil. They were names you would associate with operating systems, smartphones, and social media.

  “Like Henry Ford paying for an automotive museum out of his own pocket,” I said.

  “These families unleashed on the world all that was beneficial and malicious about the Old Internet, and they reaped the whirlwind. Some describe them as the robber barons of their time.”

  “Do you?”

  He made a light shrug. “We’re here to deliver history, not interpret it.”

  “Which makes it easier to accept their charity.”

  “I’m a pragmatic man,” Clift said with a cheery smile he never seemed without.

  Utensils in hand, I asked, “Why keep the entire Internet, though? Lots of garbage on the Old Internet.”

  “Some people might say the Old Internet represented mountains of bluster and ignorance and empty opinions,” Clift said. “Advertising and spam and malware comprise a healthy percentage of the corpus. But every page is valuable to us. From the New York Times down to blogs on collecting Cabbage Patch dolls, every page is precious.”

  “You learn a lot about Depression Era America from the first copy of Superman,” Warwick croaked from his chair. A Morse code of tomato bisque dots ran down his beard. “It was produced as a comic book for small children. Today, it’s a key to understanding American culture in the early twentieth century.”